Though Washington Irving (1783–1859) is often seen as the prototype of the successful American writer, he actually stumbled into his astonishing career. For over 50 years, he produced one best-selling book after another. Histories, biographies, essays, and tales poured from his pen. He commanded high advances and earned unprecedented royalties. He hobnobbed with the great and the powerful; named for George Washington, he was favored as a small boy with a presidential pat on the head. Once, when he crashed a White House party, he charmed Dolley Madison, whom he later described as “a fine, portly, buxom dame.” Despite his international celebrity, Irving was refreshingly unpretentious. He basked in the admiration of Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, who sent him fan letters, but when Irving wrote, he wrote for money. This frank singleness of purpose accounts for much of his enduring charm.

As Brian Jay Jones shows in “Washington Irving: An American Original” (Arcade, 480 pages, $29.99), Irving’s literary career was launched on a prank. Exactly 201 years ago tomorrow — on January 24, 1807 — the first issue of Salmagundi appeared in New York. The magazine, which took its name from a popular 18th-century dish made of chopped meat, anchovies, eggs, onions, and various spices, was an instant success. Irving and his “lads,” a like-minded group of young idlers, wrote under outlandish pen names; he himself contributed theater criticism under the byline of “Will Wizard, Esq.,” along with essays on “fashion and dancing” under the pseudonym “Anthony Evergreen, Gent.” In later issues, there were zany contributions by Irving’s brother William under the aliases of Pindar Cockloft, “poet,” and the equally enigmatic “Mustapha Rub-A-Dub Keli Khan,” supposedly a “ship’s captain” from Tripoli held prisoner in New York.

Salmagundi was a collaborative venture, and yet much of Irving’s impish and genially irreverent tone shows through. The magazine, which survived for 20 issues, brought a new accent to American letters. It was the first manifesto in a long history of American literary mischief. It set out “to instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town and castigate the age.” And the editors were brash enough to add that “this is an arduous task, and therefore we undertake it with confidence.” This was a young voice, elegantly modulated but quite startling in its impudence. Irving, a Federalist, even satirized Thomas Jefferson (whom he dubbed “William ‘The Testy’ Klieft”) as a long-winded, self-infatuated bore.

As Mr. Jones shows, Irving had a penchant for simultaneous camouflage and ostentation. He hid under pseudonyms, yet was precocious at courting public attention. This was especially clear in his first great success, his “A History of New York,” published in 1809 as the work of the elusive “Diedrich Knickerbocker.” Knickerbocker — from whom the New York Knicks, of course, take their name — was an eccentric recluse who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Irving published notices in newspapers inquiring about his whereabouts and the public responded. By the time the book appeared, the case of the missing author had become a cause célèbre and sales were brisk.

Throughout his later career, Irving resorted to fanciful pen names, including Geoffrey Crayon, Dick Buckram, and the sonorous Fray Antonio Agapida, supposedly a Spanish monk. Mr. Jones lists these, but refrains from pursuing the issue. Was Irving coyly indulging a whimsical convention of the time? Or was there some deeper motivation in his subterfuge? From Mr. Jones’s account, it seems obvious that Irving felt somehow compelled to strike poses, as if, like an actor, he could sound authentic only in a borrowed voice.

Similarly, in dealing with Irving’s lifelong bachelorhood, Mr. Jones speculates — all too inevitably — on his sexual orientation. At one moment, he suggests “possible homosexuality” but, at another, bluntly declares Irving “a closeted homosexual.” In this respect, the most revealing document Mr. Jones produces is a heartbroken letter that Irving wrote when Henry Brevoort, his best friend, got married. In the letter, Irving complains that Brevoort’s bride has “completely usurped my place,” and expresses the hope that “she may prove as constant & faithful to you as I have been.” It is hard to know how to read this letter — certainly men were more forthright at the time in expressing open affection — but by describing it merely as “sad” and “understated,” Mr. Jones appears to skirt an issue that he himself has, quite gratuitously, raised.

Washington Irving is conventionally portrayed as the first professional American author. His shrewdness in gauging his readership, his firm dealings with publishers, his advocacy of copyright, all reinforce this portrayal. Mr. Jones brings new and fresh evidence to demonstrate just how shrewd and astute Irving could be, for all his apparent nonchalance. Even so, the man remains a puzzle. A traveling companion whom Mr. Jones quotes described him as “a man of grave, indeed a melancholy aspect, of very staid manners.” There was more to Irving than the professional best-selling author. Like Rip Van Winkle, he had experienced the shock of a new world. A child of the American Revolution, he knew, however secretly, what it felt like to ride with the Headless Horseman.

eormsby@nysun.com